POWDERHAM AND THE COURTENAYS—STARCROSS
But the coast really does not reach to Exeter. Let us take boat across
from the picturesque waterside of Topsham, and then follow the western
bank of Exe down to the sea. It is by far the prettier and more rural
side, but, perversely enough, all the eastern shore, including Lympstone
and Exmouth, looks in the distance exceptionally beautiful; and no one
who only knows the west is content until he has crossed and explored the
east. But it is the better part to remain so far untravelled, and to keep
the illusion.
The South Western Railway has exploited the eastern shore of Exe,
and the Great Western runs its main line along the west, and each is
characteristic: the South Western peculiarly suburban, bustling and
commonplace, the Great Western sweeping on in noble curves, with a
wayside station, at which trains rarely halt, planted here and there. It
skirts the water on one hand, and Powderham Park, seat of the Earls of
Devon, on the other.
Romance, as well as beauty, belongs to Powderham, for it has been for
over five hundred years the seat of the Courtenays, a younger branch
of the family which was settled at Courtenay, fifty-six miles south
of Paris, in the ninth century. They married into the royal family of
France, and three in succession were Emperors of Constantinople in
the last days of Christian rule there. It seems a proud thing to have
numbered emperors among one’s ancestors, but those imperial Courtenays
of old Byzantium were, it must be owned, put to many indignities and
miserable shifts, and the imperial purple was more than a thought
moth-eaten. They were reduced to selling and mortgaging their property,
to scouring half Europe for alms, and in the end the Turks captured their
sorry empire. Then the elder Courtenays returned to the rank of French
nobles, and although they had an admixture of royal blood, sank gradually
throughout the centuries until at length they became simple peasants. The
last of them died towards the middle of the eighteenth century.
The English Courtenays appear to derive from Reginald de Courtenay, who
relinquished his French nationality and properties, and in the reign of
Henry the Second came to England. He acquired honours and manors, and
was the ancestor of Hugh de Courtenay, Baron of Okehampton, created Earl
of Devon as heir in right of his mother, to the lands and titles of the
De Redvers family, who had previously held the earldom. Powderham came
to the Courtenays with the second earl, to whom it was brought by his
wife, Margaret, daughter of the Earl of Hereford. He gave it to his sixth
son, Philip, who was the builder of the castle. Here his descendants,
members of the younger of the branches into which the English Courtenays
spread, have ever since resided, and might have been merely squires or
knights yet, but for the misfortunes that befell the members of the elder
branch, who in the wars of rival York and Lancaster took the losing
side, with the result that three brothers in succession, the sixth,
seventh and eighth earls, sealed with their blood, on scaffold or in
stricken field, their devotion to the Red Rose. With those gallant, but
ill-fated partisans of a just cause the elder line became extinct, and
when the family honours were revived under the Lancastrian Henry the
Seventh, they went to the next branch in order of seniority, represented
by Sir Edward Courtenay of Haccombe, the first earl of a new creation.
To him succeeded his grandson, son of Sir William Courtenay and the Lady
Katherine Plantagenet daughter of Edward the Fourth; second earl, and
later advanced to be Marquis of Exeter. The fortunes of the Courtenays
now seemed to be again improving, but those were the times of Henry the
Eighth, when quick changes and dramatic reverses of fortune were the
rule. The same king who had created the earl a marquis later capriciously
sent him to the block, confiscated his property, and annulled the family
honours. A strange romance sheds a mysterious glamour over the story
of his son Edward, who is said to have been loved by Queen Mary and
slighted by him for her sister, Elizabeth. The queen made him earl of
yet another new creation, but later threw him into prison on an absurd
charge of aiding the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt, which he had really
been largely instrumental in quelling. It was ill consorting with the
Tudors, or even living in their times, for they were tigerish alike
in their affections and their hatreds. This ill-used young earl—“this
beautiful youth,” Gibbon calls him—was released, but died mysteriously,
it is supposed of poison—at Padua, in 1556. With him that branch of the
Courtenays, and it was long supposed the title also, became extinct.
Meanwhile the junior branch, the Courtenays of Powderham, continued
unmolested. “He that is low need fear no foe,” says the old proverb; and
those plain knights and, later, baronets excited the jealousy of no one.
So they continued until the era of beheadings and forfeitures ended,
when Sir William Courtenay was created Viscount Courtenay in 1762. And
viscounts they might be yet, only in 1851 an accomplished genealogist,
looking over the patent of nobility granted by Queen Mary, discovered
the all-important fact that the usual words “_de corpore_,” limiting the
title to direct descendants, were not included. The succession was thus
extended to collaterals, and the curious fact was revealed that for two
hundred and seventy-five years the Courtenays of Powderham had been earls
unknown to themselves, and had gratefully accepted inferior honours
while legally possessed of greater.
The claim being proved before the House of Lords, the third viscount in
this manner, became the tenth earl. It was he who, regaining the title,
plunged the Courtenays again into embarrassments and alienated much of
the family property, and it was Viscount Courtenay, son of the venerable
eleventh earl, who still further wrecked their fortunes by his losses
upon the Turf, which were partly liquidated during his short tenure of
the title. The thirteenth earl, who died in 1904, ninety-three years of
age, was uncle of the twelfth, and rector of Powderham. He resided at the
rectory; for, of the 50,000 acres and the yearly rent-roll of £40,000,
mentioned in the New Domesday Book, only an inconsiderable residue is
left. Gibbon says of the French Courtenays and their old home: “The
Castle of Courtenay was profaned by a plebeian owner,” and here we see
the strange spectacle of the seat of the English Courtenays being let to
a stranger, and the titled owner of it, a clergyman, living obscurely
on the fringe of his own encumbered domain. The reverses of fortune
experienced by this ancient race may well seem to render their old motto,
adopted in the sixteenth century, still applicable: _Ubi lapsus? Quid
feci?_ = “Where have I fallen? What have I done?” It is, at any rate,
better than their sentiment of later years: _Quod verum tutum_ = “What is
true is safe.” That is indeed a hard saying.
There is no other family so constantly met with in Devon. Villages—like
Sampford Courtenay—bear their name: their monuments are in Exeter
Cathedral, and in many a town and village church, and in the majority of
ancient Devon churches you will at least see their easily distinguished
arms sculptured somewhere—the three golden torteaux, roundels, or
bezants, supposed by some to have originated in the family association
with the Byzantine crown, or flippantly thought by others to typify their
last three sovereigns.
The old church of Powderham, built of the rich, red sandstone, stands
quite close to the railway, amid the trees of the noble deer-haunted
park. The railway then, following the shore along a low sea-wall, comes
to the wooden station of Starcross, through which most of the trains
rush without stopping. From its crazy timber platforms, standing with
their feet in the water, you look across nearly two miles of salt water
to Exmouth, transfigured by distance; its dreadful make-believe Gothic
church, built in the architectural dark ages of the opening years of
the nineteenth century, bulking like a cathedral. A steam launch plies
between Starcross and Exmouth in these days, instead of the row-boat that
once gave such tremendous rowing to get across; so the sundered shores of
Exe are become less foreign and speculative to one another than they were
of old. But, as the reader will have already perceived, these increased
facilities have destroyed illusions. Exmouth we have already revealed
for what it is, rather than what it seems, across the shining water, and
Lympstone, yonder, looks better from Starcross than close at hand:
To those given to grotesque phonetic affinities, Lympstone suggests
cripples; for myself, looking here across the pale blue and opalesque
estuary, where the seagulls ride the still waters, waiting for the tide
to ebb and the small sprats and the cockles to become revealed as meals,
Lympstone suggests a limpid stream and refreshing breezes. There it
nestles; a little strand with little houses and a little church, set down
in the opening between two little cliffs of red, red sandstone; but when
you arrive there Lympstone is modern, the church has been rebuilt, with
the exception of the tower, and an ornate clock-tower, Jubilee or other,
flaunts it insolently.
Starcross itself has been described as “a melancholy attempt at a
watering-place,”—probably by some person who regards Exmouth as a
cheerful and successful effort in that direction; but “There’s no
accounting for tastes,” as the old woman said when she kissed her cow.
As sheer matter of fact, Starcross never attempted anything in that
way, but just—like Topsy—“grew,” and so became what it is; a large
village of one long, single-sided street, looking once uninterruptedly
upon the shore and the water, but since the railway came, commanding
first-class views of expresses, locals, and goods-trains; and more or
less identified by strangers with a singular Italianate tall red tower,
sole relic of the atmospheric system with which the then South Devon
Railway was opened in 1846. This survival of one of the old engine-houses
completes a conspicuously beautiful view along the Exe, raised thereby
to the likeness of an Italian lake. The one other remarkable feature of
Starcross is the curious little steamship, modelled like a swan, that for
some fifty or more years past has been moored off Starcross jetty; to the
huge amazement of travellers coming this way for the first time.
For the rest, Starcross is merely a more or less modern development of a
very ancient little fisher hamlet of the inland parish of Kenton, close
upon two miles inland, and is said to have been originally “Stair-cross”;
a crossing, or passage, to Exmouth. Maps, showing how the road from
Exeter only approaches the coast at this point and then immediately turns
away again, support this view.
The high road, leaving Starcross, winds around Cockwood Creek, and
passing for a while over level ground ascends, steep and narrow and
between high banks, past the old-time smugglers’ haunt, “Mount Pleasant
Inn,” and so over the cliff top to Dawlish. Hut the coastwise path by
the Warren, and so over the railway to Langston Cliff and the sea-wall,
is the only way for beauty. Over the cliffs, by the high road, you
come dispirited into Dawlish, with the latest greedy proceedings of
speculative builders very much in evidence before the town itself is
seen. Such a manner of approach is highly injurious. It is as though a
guest bidden to a country house were admitted through the back door. One
had rather enter Dawlish by train, for the railway runs along a sea-wall
under the cliffs, and the station is built on the edge of the sands.